zaterdag 8 februari 2014

Greetings,The defeat of AIPAC's ill-advised push for new sanctions on Iran in the midst of successful negotiations is nothing short of historic. I write in the Huffington Post today on why and how it happened, what the longer term implications are and what it means for the next fight - the struggle over the final nuclear agreement with Iran.

Sincerely,Trita Parsi, PhD

The Illusion of AIPAC's Invincibility

The defeat of AIPAC's ill-advised push for new sanctions on Iran in the midst of successful negotiations is nothing short of historic. The powerful and hawkish pro-Israeli lobby's defeats are rare and seldom public. But in the last year, it has suffered three major public setbacks, of which the sanctions defeat is the most important one.

AIPAC's first defeat was over the nomination of Senator Chuck Hagel for secretary of defense. In spite of a major campaign defaming Hagel, even accusing him of anti-Semitism, his nomination won approval in the Senate.

The second was over President Barack Obama's push for military action against Syria. AIPAC announced that it would send hundreds of citizen lobbyists to the Hill to help secure approval for authorization of the use of force. But AIPAC and Obama were met with stiff resistance. The American people quickly mobilized and ferociously opposed the idea of yet another war in the Middle East. By some accounts, AIPAC failed to secure the support of a single member of Congress.

The third defeat was over new Iran sanctions. Now, AIPAC and the president were on opposite sides. The interim nuclear agreements from November of last year, explicitly stated that no new sanctions could be imposed. Yet, backed by Senators Mark Kirk and Robert Menendez, AIPAC pushed for new sanctions, arguing that it would enhance America's negotiating position. The White House strongly disagreed, fearing that new sanctions would cause the collapse of diplomacy and make America look like the intransigent party. The international coalition the president had carefully put together against Iran would fall apart, and the US and Iran would once again find themselves on a path towards military confrontation.

But AIPAC insisted. Its immense lobbying activities secured 59 cosponsors for the bill, including 16 Democrats. Its aim was first to reach over 60 cosponsors to force the bill to the floor, and then more than 67 cosponsors to make it veto proof.

But 59 cosponsors turned it to be a magical ceiling AIPAC could not break through. Supporters of diplomacy put up an impressive defense of the negotiations policy, building both off of years of careful development of a pro-diplomacy constituency and coalition machinery as well as the grassroots muscle of more recent additions to the pro-diplomacy camp. (To get a hint of who these forces are, see the coalition letter against new sanctions signed by more than 70 organizations and organized by Win Without War, FCNL and my own organization, the National Iranian American Council.)

The watershed moment came when the White House raised the temperature and called out the sanctions supporters for increasing the likelihood of war.

"If certain members of Congress want the United States to take military action, they should be up front with the American public and say so," Bernadette Meehan, National Security Council spokeswoman, said in a statement. "Otherwise, it's not clear why any member of Congress would support a bill that possibly closes the door on diplomacy and makes it more likely that the United States will have to choose between military options or allowing Iran's nuclear program to proceed."

The prospect of coming across as "warmongers" incensed AIPAC and its supporters. But the White House knew exactly what it was doing. It was tapping into the only force that could stop AIPAC -- the war wariness of the American public. The very same energy among the public that put a stop to the White House's war plans for Syria, would now be used to put a stop to AIPAC's efforts to sabotage the last best chance to avoid war with Iran.

The angry reaction of the sanctions supporters only confirmed the effectiveness of the White House's strategy. AIPAC was put on the defensive and it could never explain how imposing diplomacy-killing sanctions actually was good for the negotiations. Chemi Shalev of the Israeli daily Haaretz put it best:

"Some of [AIPAC's] supporters claimed that it was meant to strengthen Obama's hand in the nuclear negotiations with Iran, when it was clear that they meant just the opposite: to weaken the President and to sabotage the talks. They couldn't speak this truth outright, so they surrounded it, as Churchill once said, with a bodyguard of lies."

AIPAC finally threw in the towel on new sanctions last Thursday. The defeat was an undeniable fact.

These three defeats show the importance of mobilization. Absent the work of the pro-diplomacy coalition, both the careful groundwork laid in the last few years as well as the intense mobilization in the last few weeks, it is not clear whether the White House could have won this fight -- or if they even would have tried. The NSC spokesperson's statement was clearly an attempt to activate the pro-democracy grassroots since their help was needed.

But the defeats also show that the dominance of AIPAC has to a large extent depended on the absence of the American public. The majority of Americans has too many concerns and is too distracted to focus consistently on foreign policy matters, giving a small, but focused minority the ability to dominate these issues. Until, that is, the larger public wakes up and gets in the game.

AIPAC of course remains an immensely powerful organization, but these recent defeats go beyond these specific issues. The real loss AIPAC has suffered is that the illusion of its invincibility has been shattered. Much of its power has lied in the (false) belief that it is invincible. This illusion provided AIPAC with tremendous deterrence -- convinced that they would lose, most groups simply did not bother to go up against AIPAC. Consequently, AIPAC won most of its battles on walk-over. That may change now.

The next showdown is only months away. Having lost the sanctions vote, AIPAC is shifting its focus to the final stage negotiations over Iran's nuclear program. Its second path for collapsing the talks is to push for a non-starter final agreement -- a return to the Bush administration's policy of a complete dismantlement of the Iranian nuclear program and zero enrichment. This would cause the Iranians to walk away from the table. In fact, the interim deal already makes clear that Iran will have enrichment on its soil at the end of the final deal. Once again, AIPAC's demands violate the previous agreement. It seeks to renegotiate everything Obama already has painstakingly settled with Iran.

It remains to be seen if it can win that battle and collapse the talks. But its recent failure shows that the outcome is far from predetermined. It all depends on the American public and the intensity of their desire to avoid war with Iran.

The Hebrew Bible’s oldest chapters– Genesis, Exodus, and even Judges purport to discuss events thousands of years ago. The custom in Western biblical scholarship is to date Abraham to e.g. 2000 B.C. This dating is based on nothing more than counting generations (“begats”) backward and assigning an arbitrary number of years to each generation. In fact, Genesis is replete with myths and assertions of people living hundreds of years, and was only historicized in this way by 19th century positivists.

But here is proof that the Bible was written late and projects later developments into the distant past: it alleges that people had domesticated camels four millennia ago in what is now Israel. And that assertion, folks, is simply not true. That is the finding of Sapir-Hen and Ben-Yosef.

E.g. Genesis 24: 64 says, “Rebekah lifted up her eyes, and when she saw Isaac she dismounted from the camel.” If this encounter happened circa 2026 BC, it was happening a thousand years before anyone was riding camels.

The archeologists’ digs near the Jordanian border find evidence of domesticated camels sort of 930-900 BC. But they don’t find that evidence in any settlements older than 930 BC. There is a pretty clear dividing line between the pre-domestic camel and post- domestic camel settlements.

Although it was likely based on previous oral tales, the Bible probably wasn’t written down in something like its present form until the Babylonian exile, 586-539 B.C. When those scribes reworked the folk tales of the Canaanites, they projected sixth-century BC realities back into the past. Thus, they had characters riding camels before they were domesticated. Riding a camel was taken for granted in 580 BC.

You might think this point is a minor one. But it demonstrates how the scribes worked. They projected recent things into the distant past.

In short, those far right wing Israelis who use the bible stories as a basis for kicking Palestinians out of their homes in East Jerusalem are making many mistakes, including historical ones, as well as human rights mistakes.

Juan Cole is Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan.www.juancole.com

Syria: U.S. imperialism and diplomacy

The much ballyhooed Geneva II peace talks, which were supposed to bring about peace in Syria, ended on Jan. 31 with no agreement for one very good reason: The U.S had no intention of seeking any real peace agreement, but was intent on using the forum as a background for propaganda and as a way to deceive and weaken the Syrian government.

No concessions were offered by the imperialists and their allies, while they continued to arm the “rebel” forces both directly and indirectly, through such countries as Saudi Arabia. Indeed, some analysts believe that the U.S. is trying to achieve through diplomacy what it is failing to do on the battlefield.

For example, Patrick Cockburn, writing in the Jan. 31 Independent (Britain), notes, “For negotiations to have any hope of success they must reflect the balance of power on the ground in Syria. … [Syrian] forces hold 13 out 14 Syrian provincial capitals and are slowly retaking districts in Damascus, Homs and Aleppo captured by rebels in 2012.”

A strong indication of the lack of seriousness for real peace can be ascertained by looking at a list of the attendees, which included more than 40 countries and organizations from around the world, many of them far removed from the Middle East. Included were all the NATO countries and other stalwart U.S. allies, such as Japan and Australia, and just about every enemy of the Syrian government that could be found.

Pointedly not included was one of Syria’s allies, Iran, though it was at first invited to the talks by the United Nations and then humiliatingly disinvited because of objections from the U.S. and Saudi Arabia. The Jan. 20 New York Times called this move a “fitting prelude” to the conference.

Another indication of the imperialists’ deception can be seen in the tactics used to get the Syrians, as well as China and the Russian Federation, to attend the conference in the first place. The U.S. and others stressed that there were no “preconditions” to the talks, including the role of President Bashar al-Assad in any future government of Syria.

Syria demands apology from Kerry

The talks had scarcely begun when Secretary of State John Kerry loudly and insultingly attacked Assad, stating in the Jan. 22 Huffington Post that “there is no way that Syrian President Bashar Assad can be part of a transitional government.”

This was part of a weeklong cacophony of propaganda from the Western media attacking the Syrian regime, complete with pictures of victims and statistics of the civil war, for which total responsibility was unjustly attributed to the Syrian government.

While the propaganda exploited the plight of people in the Old City of Homs, which was being besieged by the government, what was left unreported, according to the Independent, was the fact that the rebels are conducting their own siege of 45,000 people in the towns of Zahraa and Nubl, outside Aleppo. In fact, during the talks relief was sent to Homs, and all who wanted to were permitted to leave.

According to the Feb. 1 Alalam, Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Muallem lashed back, calling on the U.S to issue an apology for Kerry’s remarks. He also slammed the hypocrisy of the “unjust” international community that imposes sanctions on a war-torn country.

“It is an ‘international community’ that adopts double standards policy, and is mostly dominated by the U.S. … They dominate the U.N. Security Council and the U.N.”

Muallem questioned how the West could be involved in the Geneva talks and at the same time “impose sanctions on the Syrian people and children?”

Alalam on Feb. 2 reported that Muallem asked European Union Foreign Policy Chief Catherine Ashton to explain how the West can impose a ban on food products, yet at the same time discuss the issue of humanitarian aid shipments.

Meanwhile, more than 200 pro-Syrian demonstrators marched outside the building where the talks were held. Similar demonstrations have occurred around the world in opposition to the unjust U.S. intervention in Syria. n

vrijdag 7 februari 2014

The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion, but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do.

Samuel Huntington.The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996)

America is today the leader of a world-wide anti-revolutionary movement in the defense of vested interests. She now stands for what Rome stood for. Rome consequently supported the rich against the poor in all foreign communities that fell under her sway; and, since the poor, sofar, have always and everywhere been far more numerous than the rich, Rome’s policy made for inequality, for injustice, and for the least happiness of the greatest number.

Arnold J. Toynbee. America and the World Revolution and Other Lectures. 1962.

a veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts,' die 'lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he is researching a new book, 'Big Money and the Corporate State: How Global Banks, Corporations, and Speculators Rule and How to Nonviolently Break Their Hold.'

Dinsdag 4 februari 2014 schreef Wiseman:

AIPAC and the Israel Lobby: Down, but Not Yet Out!

In March 2006, the London Review of Books published a path-breaking essay on'The Israel Lobby' by University of Chicago political scientist John Mearsheimer and Harvard's Stephen Walt. The two then published a book the following year,'The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.' They argued that a loose coalition - including leading journalists and media outlets, neo-conservatives, Christian Zionists, and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) - held a 'stranglehold' on U.S. policy in the Middle East and on any public discussion of it.

The mud-slinging that followed confirmed their argument, as the ever watchful Philip Weiss noted at the time. Some supporters of Israel compared the authors to Neo-Nazis and grubby Jew-baiters. The Anti-Defamation League called their argument 'a classical conspiratorial anti-Semitics analysis invoking the canards of Jewish power and Jewish control.' And Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz, that paragon of even-handed objectivity, decreed that the two men had 'destroyed their professional reputations.'

The same mud-slingers still call their political foes anti-Semites, which drains the word of all meaning - a dangerously short-sighted reaction given the resurgence of neo-Nazis on the streets of Paris, as I reported last week. But the Israel Lobby's stranglehold on Washington has visibly weakened, thanks in good measure to the bravery of Mearsheimer and Walt. Courage is indeed contagious.

Think back to August 2013, when Obama and Kerry called for a not-so-limited military strike on Syria following reports that the government of Bashir al-Assad had used poison gas. To this day, Washington has not shown that the horrific use of gas came from Assad's forces rather than from the Sunni rebels. But, no matter, AIPAC and its pro-Israel allies led a massive campaign to support U.S. military intervention. They pushed and they failed. Ignoring 'the impossibility' of ever defeating the Israel Lobby, progressive organizers - many of them Jewish - mobilized public opinion to flood the White House, Congress, and the media with petitions, emails, and telephone calls opposing yet another U.S. military action in the Middle East. […]

Syria's civil war continues on its tragic path, and not even Washington's 'humanitarian warriors' openly call for U.S. military intervention. But the big fight here is that Obama's stand-down on Syria led to negotiations with the Iranians over their nuclear program, which the Israel Lobby is doing everything it can to scuttle. They came close to succeeding. They still might. At one point, they looked as if they had enough senators in their pocket to pass a bill enacting new sanctions against Iran, which could have made negotiations impossible.

Once again, progressive organizers mobilized the largest outpouring of public opinion many Congressional staffers had ever seen, and - believe it or not - Obama stood firm and hit hard. 'If certain members of Congress want the United States to take military action, they should be up front with the American public and say so,' said a spokeswoman for his National Security Council. Then, in his State of the Union speech, Obama raised the stakes. 'If this Congress sends me a new sanctions bill now that threatens to derail these talks,' he promised, 'I will veto it.'

Will negotiations stop the Iranians from ever getting a nuclear weapon? They might, or they might not. But the truth is that, according to the polls, the American people do not want to go to war to stop them. On that, as the Israel Lobby still has to learn, our fellow citizens are absolutely right.

OXFORD, England — On Jan. 14, the Israeli defense minister, Moshe Yaalon, told the daily Yediot Aharonot, “Secretary of State John Kerry — who arrived here determined, who operates from an incomprehensible obsession and a sense of messianism — can’t teach me anything about the conflict with the Palestinians.” Even by Israeli standards, Mr. Yaalon’s comments were rather rude. Mr. Kerry’s crime was to try to broker Israeli-Palestinian peace talks that began last July and to stipulate a nine-month deadline. This is the kind of talk that gives chutzpah a bad name.

The episode also reveals a great deal about the nature of the much-vaunted special relationship between the United States and Israel. It suggests that this relationship is a one-way street, with America doing all the diplomatic heavy lifting while Israel limits its role to obstruction and whining — repaying Uncle Sam’s generosity with ingratitude and scorn. […]

There is no rational argument, however, that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank serves America’s national interest. On the contrary, as General David Petraeus told a Senate committee in 2010, the occupation foments anti-American sentiment throughout the Islamic world and hinders the development of America’s partnership with Arab governments. A resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is therefore a major, if not vital American interest.

America poses as an honest broker, but everywhere it is perceived as Israel's lawyer. The American-sponsored “peace process” since 1991 has been a charade: all process and no peace while providing Israel with just the cover it needs to pursue its illegal and aggressive colonial project on the West Bank.

The Quartet, which consists of the United States, Russia, the United Nations and European Union, came up in 2003 with an excellent road map for the establishment of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel by the end of 2005. But the Quartet cannot act independently of the United States to pressure Israel. Its record suggests that it is little more than a clever American device for wasting time.

Mr. Kerry is to be commended for the energy and commitment that he has displayed in pursuit of peace in the Middle East and for the 11 trips he has made to the region in his first year in office. But his peace mission was doomed to failure from the start. The Kerry-hating Mr. Yaalon and his hawk-infested Likud party are committed to the geopolitical status quo on the West Bank at almost any price. Their real aim is to terminate the peace talks and blame the Palestinians.

In a normal country a defense minister who played fast and loose with such a crucial bilateral relationship would have been thrown out on his ear. But Israel is not a normal country.

The reason that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not disown his defense minister is that what Mr. Yaalon said is what Mr. Netanyahu thinks. The real problem is not Mr. Yaalon’s bad manners but the policy that he and Mr. Netanyahu are trying to foist on their senior ally: to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, to confront Iran, to protect Israel’s nuclear monopoly, and to preserve its regional hegemony solely by military means. This program is diametrically opposed to America’s true national security interests.

America gives Israel money, arms and advice. Israel takes the money, it takes the arms, and it rudely rejects the advice.

The fundamental problem with American support for Israel is its unconditional nature. Consequently, Israel does not have to pay a price for acting unilaterally in a multilateral world, for its flagrant violations of international law, and for its systematic abuse of Palestinian human rights.

Blind support for the Jewish state does not advance the cause of peace. America is going nowhere in the Middle East until it makes the provision of money and arms conditional on good manners and, more importantly, on Israeli respect for its advice.

Former Israel Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s offer to the Palestinians: 80 percent of 22 percent. Under Sharon’s ‘Peace Plan’ to the Palestinians in 2000, as well as the ‘Road Map’ of 2002, the Palestinians were offered 42 percent of 80 percent of 22 percent of 100 percent of the land, calculated to be 7.4 percent of the initial 100 percent of land, on condition that: 1. Palestinians stop resistance to the occupation, 2. Refugees give up their right of return to their ancestral homes, 3. Palestinians agree to only elect officials acceptable to Bush and Sharon, 4. Palestinians do not object to the ‘wall’ that Sharon is building, 5. Palestinians agree not to claim Jerusalem as their capital.

Israel did not withdraw to the positions of 28 September 2000, a key requirement of Phase I of the Roadmap. Instead, movement of Palestinians was heavily impeded by numerous roadblocks, earth mounds and checkpoints,and movement between West Bank and Gaza was virtually impossible. According to Israel, the Palestinians did not fulfil their obligation to end violence and terrorism, and therefore they refused to withdraw.

Israel also did not freeze settlement expansion, nor dismantle outposts built since 2001, another requirement of the Roadmap. Instead, the number of settlers continued growing. Even during the Second Intifada the settler population kept growing at a high rate, in a remarkably straight line. From 2000 to 2004, the number of settlers in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem increased with more than 50,000. From 2004 to 2008, the Jewish population grew with some 70,000.

Additionally, more Palestinian land was confiscated and annexed by means of the expanding West Bank barrier. Despite a ruling of the International Court of Justice, who declared the barrier beyond the Green Line illegal, Israel decided to build the Wall up to 22 km inside the West Bank, east of Ariel, and east of other large settlement blocs. On the other hand, more than 1,500 Palestinian homes were demolished throughout the Palestinian Territories, and build-up of Palestinian structures was virtually completely denied.

Als belangrijkste grondlegger van de zionistische staat had al hij al in 1938, tien jaar vóór de stichting van de zionistische staat verklaard dat 'after the formation of a large army in the wake of the establishment of the state, we will abolish partition and expand to the whole of palestine.' Een jaar eerder had Ben-Goerion zijn zoon Amos geschreven:

We are now spectators of the latest - and perhaps penultimate - chapter of the 60 year old conflict between Israel and the Palestinian people. About the complexities of this tragic conflict billions of words have been pronounced, defending one side or the other. Today, in face of the Israeli attacks on Gaza, the essential calculation, which was always covertly there, behind this conflict, has been blatantly revealed. The death of one Israeli victim justifies the killing of a hundred Palestinians. One Israeli life is worth a hundred Palestinian lives. This is what the Israeli State and the world media more or less - with marginal questioning - mindlessly repeat. And this claim, which has accompanied and justified the longest Occupation of foreign territories in 20th C. European history, is viscerally racist. That the Jewish people should accept this, that the world should concur, that the Palestinians should submit to it - is one of history's ironic jokes. There's no laughter anywhere. We can, however, refute it, more and more vocally. Let's do so.